Healthcare

Westside Progressives Picnic

Join Marcy Winograd & Friends for a picnic in the park tomorrow noon to 4 PM, where Marcy will be a featured speaker and will talk about the economy and health care. Hear the latest on the congressional campaign and how you can get involved right now. Map, RSVP, & More.

UNIVERSAL SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE FORUM

10:00 am - 1:00 pm (Doors open 9:30am for coffee, bagels etc.)
Proponents of Senator Mark Leno's California Senate Bill 810 and U.S.Congressman John Conyers' HR 676 in the House of Representatives will come together to discuss their positions and other options, and then participate in a question and answer dialogue. More and Map

Obama’s Emerging Legacy: Wars, Bankers and For-Profit Healthcare
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report

The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office. "At some point in the near future Barack Obama will become inextricably associated in the public mind with Big Capital – and deservedly so." The 'Obama Effect' has led to the near-total collapse of the Left."

As of this writing, the Progressives for Obama website still exists, a relic of Left delusion that should have died of embarrassment months ago. Barack Obama has, indeed, grown in the presidency – but not into the FDR-like figure of his leftish supporters’ imaginations. Nor has his presence in the Oval Office served to spur Blacks and progressives to dramatic action, creating the “push” that Left Obamites had predicted would allow their champion to act on his more “liberal” instincts. Quite the contrary. The “Obama Effect” has led to the near-total collapse of the Left– both its white and Black wings – and made the nation safe for rule by finance capital and militarists.

The military, finance capital and healthcare corporations (insurers are a branch of finance capital) are winning every important battle because, on fundamental issues, President Obama is on their side. It is he who crushed the anti-war bloc in the US. House; who silenced and marginalized single payer advocates, while fawning over health profiteers; who engineered the greatest transfer of wealth in human history to bankers, leaving them free to once again ruin themselves and the rest of us.

So let us give President Obama his due. He not only smashed the Left opposition, he humiliated them. Read more.

Check this out.

Digby does a fine job of pointing out the New York Times' lousy job of writing about healthcare, but then adds this inaccurate comment:

"In fairness, Baucus wasn't alone in taking single payer off the table. The presidential candidates all did that ... "

Health Insurance Insider: 'They Dump the Sick'
Retired Health Insurance Executive Blows the Whistle on His Former Industry
By Alice Gomstyn | ABC News Business Unit

Frustrated Americans have long complained that their insurance companies valued the all-mighty buck over their health care. Today, a retired insurance executive confirmed their suspicions, arguing that the industry that once employed him regularly rips off its policyholders.

"[T]hey confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors," former Cigna senior executive Wendell Potter said during a hearing on health insurance today before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Potter, who has more than 20 years of experience working in public relations for insurance companies Cigna and Humana, said companies routinely drop seriously ill policyholders so they can meet "Wall Street's relentless profit expectations."

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment," Potter said. "…(D)umping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line." Read more.

SINGLE PAYER WORKING GROUP SUMMER UNITY SESSION

Calling all single payer activists who would like to be heavily involved in planning activities for the single payer movement this summer and beyond! Join us as we set goals for the next 90 days and develop a strategy for meeting those goals. Click for details.

Richmond VA: Health Care Reform Town Hall on Tues. 6/30 - Reserve Your Seat Now! Details here.

Dan Monte did a very interesting write-up about facts and impacts of state and national single payer health care. Read it in the ADS forums here.

By Dave Lindorff

When it comes to reforming America’s disastrous health care “system,” there are two issues that need to be considered: access and cost.

The so-called reform proposals being offered by the Obama White House, the House and the Senate, are failing on both counts, and deserve to die.

No progressives should allow themselves to be suckered into promoting one or the other.

Fraud + Betrayal American Style | H/T Yank

WASHINGTON - June 19 - Dr. Robert Stone, a leader of Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 16,000 physicians who advocate for single-payer national health insurance, spoke to the Health Care Task Force of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition on Capitol Hill Thursday.

In his remarks, Stone emphasized how single-payer health reform, as embodied in the U.S. National Health Care Act, H.R. 676, is the most fiscally responsible way of addressing the nation's health care woes.

Stone said that by replacing the for-profit, private health insurance companies with a single-payer program – an improved Medicare for All – the United States would save more than $400 billion in administrative costs annually. He also said that single payer is only reform proposal that includes effective cost-containment provisions.

What a refreshing burst of honesty.

Watch Sen. Bernie Sanders: Exorbitant Pay for Health Insurance CEOs

Sign The Petition for Single-Payer Health Care

The Finance Committee's "Comprehensive Incrementalism"
By Ezra Klein | Washington Post

The outline I was given today isn't the Finance Committee's final bill. It's not even necessarily the Chairman's Mark (the bill that will go to the rest of the committee for debate, changes, and modifications). But it's the clearest look at what Finance -- the key committee for health-care reform -- is currently considering.

You could write this story a couple of different ways. The first is to note is the Finance Committee has substantially retreated in the face of the $1.6 trillion price tag the Congressional Budget Office affixed to its original submission. This version of the plan is, comparatively, quite diminished. Read more.

Medical Conflicts of Interest and the Glass Houses
Health Care Overhaul Must Start With Doctors, One Physician Notes
Opinion by Dr. Nortin Hadler | ABCNews.com

Health care reform is focused on the quality of care, its accessibility and its cost. The debate is heated and likely to intensify in the months to come. It is also loud, so as to drown out debate on a focus for reform far more critical than impending fiscal bankruptcy.

There is debate on the degree to which health care in the United States is ethically bankrupt, and what to do about it. The Institute of Medicine and nearly every other professional organization in the health arena has chimed in. Academic health centers and unaffiliated hospitals are racing to write or expand policy statements on conflicts of interest in regard to clinical activities. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president’s congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party’s toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people, while leaving the profit centers of the current system—doctors, hospitals and the health insurance industry—in charge and in a position to continue to reap profits.

By Ray McGovern

At first I thought the BEFORE picture of the arteries around my heart may have been doctored. There it was big as life...or imminent death—the circumflex artery was 90 to 99 percent blocked. (Hadn’t heard “circumflex” since studying classical Greek. It’s what we called the mark placed over long vowels; and, sure enough, that artery had the same form as that mark.)

Turns out the picture was not doctored. But, happily, I was—by an excellent cardiologist who performed a cardio catheterization and emplaced a stent to unclog the artery. The AFTER picture showed a far happier circumflex with blood flowing freely through it.

Obama Hiding Behind Single Payer Supporters
By Michael Munk | www.MichaelMunk.com

NPR reported this from an interview this morning with HHS Secy. Kathleen Sebelius:

"Asked if the administration's program will be drafted specifically to prevent it from evolving into a single-payer plan, Sebelius says: "I think that's very much the case, and again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion."

Obama said at the AMA convention Monday:

Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investments
Key Players Have Stakes in Industry
By Paul Kane | Washington Post

Almost 30 key lawmakers helping draft landmark health-care legislation have financial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million worth of personal investments in a sector that could be dramatically reshaped by this summer's debate.

The list of members who have personal investments in the corporations that will be affected by the legislation -- which President Obama has called this year's highest domestic priority -- includes Congress's most powerful leaders and a bipartisan collection of lawmakers in key committee posts. Their total health-care holdings could be worth $27 million, because congressional financial disclosure forms released yesterday require reporting of only broad ranges of holdings rather than precise values of assets.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), for instance, has at least $50,000 invested in a health-care index, and Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), a senior member of the health committee, has between $254,000 and $560,000 worth of stock holdings in major health-care companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck.

The family of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee drafting that chamber's legislation, held at least $3.2 million in more than 20 health-care companies at the end of last year.

The reports come on the eve of what is sure to be a dramatic health-care debate in Congress, beginning with a key Senate committee hearing Tuesday. With several proposals floating on Capitol Hill, the legislative battle could overhaul an industry that represents nearly 20 percent of the national economy. Read more.

Lawmakers Rail Against Individual Health Insurance System | RTT News

"When times are good, the insurance company is happy to sign you up and take your money in the form of premiums," Stupak said. "But when times are bad, and you are afflicted with cancer or some other life-threatening disease, it is supposed to honor its commitments and stand by you in your time of need.

"Instead, some insurance companies use a technicality to justify breaking its promise, at a time when most patients are too weak to fight back," he added...."When you have cancer or you're in a position where your life is shortened to a matter of months, you can't go through the court system, because you don't have time to do that," Raddatz said.

The individual insurance system is "fundamentally flawed," the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee said Tuesday. In a hearing which featured individual policy holders who lost their coverage when they became ill, lawmakers railed against the insurance industry. However, insurance companies defended the practice, stating it is necessary as a tool against insurance fraud.

In his opening statement, panel chairman Bart Stupak, D-Mich., accused Blue Cross of California of encouraging its employees to cancel the health insurance policies of individuals with illnesses like leukemia, breast cancer, and other expensive, long term cases.

Stupak drew attention to documents that show Blue Cross supposedly giving incentive to employees who cancelled the health insurance of the patients expected to cost the company the most. Read more.

No More Pretense for Health Reform: CBO Estimates 36 million will still be uninsured ten years from now under most robust Democratic Plan
By Kevin Zeese | ProsperityAgenda.US

Well, cloudy rhetoric of “universal health care” is being clarified with the first Congressional Budget Office initial scoring of a health care bill. The two key issues of cost and coverage are not going to be solved with the health care reform being considered.

The CBO scored the Kennedy-Dodd proposal, the most robust of the reform proposals actually being considered, and the bottom line is that it will leave 36 million without coverage a decade from now. That is not what the Democrats and Obama have been promising. It is nowhere near universal coverage.

According to the budget office “Once the proposal was fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million.”

And, the Obama administration has sent word to Democrats to stop using the phrase “universal coverage.” Lynn Sweet reports in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“In discussing a ‘public option,’ Obama's message team is telling Democrats on Capitol Hill to avoid using the phrase ‘universal coverage’ because that phrase is often associated with a single-payer system, which is often associated with ‘socialism,’ which the Obama administration does not support. The Obama team-approved language is instead to talk about ‘guaranteed health care,’ a phrase that is less polarizing.”

Bill Maher's audacious commentary starts around 4:00 on healthcare, banksters, carbon dioxide reduction, BHO-TV, reform, energy, and George W. Bush on torture, deregulation, preemptive war, tax cuts for the rich.